M HKA Ensembles

° 1977

Born in London (GB).

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British painter and writer best known for her portraits of imaginary subjects and fictitious characters. 

At once, enigmatic and vivid, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are portraits of fictitious subjects. At the heart of her painting practice is invention, breathing life into the people that emerge on her canvases. The nature of Yiadom-Boakye’s work, also offers the viewer the generous opportunity to find the familiar or the idiosyncratic in these characters. With this interpretative quality to Yiadom-Boakye’s work, it has also meant that it can be drawn into discourses or representational lenses that might be considered reductive in relation to the artist’s own ideas and intentions. For the artist, her paintings have never been specifically about foregrounding race. However, it can typically be the case that Yiadom-Boakye’s works are understood as being about black representation and identity. This common reading, though not necessarily incorrect, ultimately provides a one-dimensional understanding of her work, foregrounding a racialised gaze over the artist’s exploration of figuration and free invention.